By James Aitchison

Dictionaries tell us that Utopia means a place of ideal perfection.  They also offer a secondary meaning: an impractical scheme for social improvement.

Crushing poverty, social inequality and defeat in war drove thousands to start new lives in Utopia.  Instead, most found a reality check of death and desolation in the South American jungle.

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William Lane was a firebrand — a radical Australian journalist and socialist who railed against injustice for shearers, colonial government crackdowns, drought and a looming depression.  He convinced 500 unionists, shearers and socialist Christians to join him and begin a new world order in Paraguay.  There, the government was offering 75,000 hectares of free land to migrants; after 90 per cent of the male population had perished in the war against Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, the country needed new blood. 

The first group of Australians set sail in 1893 in a tall ship built with communal funds.  Not only did they find themselves in dense tropical jungle populated by jaguars and skin-burrowing parasitic insects called polvorinos, but their leader immediately set down strict rules banning alcohol and fraternisation with local women.  So much for the working-man’s paradise.  Many of the young shearers rebelled.

After three years, Nueva Australia (New Australia) boasted a few farms, thatched cottages and villages.  Given its falling population and finances, Lane himself abandoned the colony.  He gathered a group of 60 devoted Christian socialists and started a new Utopia called Cosme.

When it too failed, Lane moved to New Zealand where, in a bizarre backflip, he became a right-wing journalist!

Among the Australians who returned home from Nueva Australia was poet Mary Gilmore, later Dame Mary Gilmore, who remained a socialist all her life. 

To this day, Nueva Australia and Cosme are still on the map.  It is estimated that 2,000 descendants of Lane’s utopian venture still live in Paraguay, with names such as Wood or Burke, and often typical traits of red hair and fair skin.

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Another firebrand, German nationalist Bernard Förster, also founded his version of Utopia in Paraguay.  His wife, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was the sister of famed philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  Founded in 1886, Nueva Germania (New Germany) was to be a model community demonstrating the supremacy of German culture and society. 

Förster drew impoverished families from Saxony to the banks of the Aguaray River where, despite their so-called Aryan supremacy, many perished of starvation, malaria and sand-flea infections.  Others fled, including Förster himself.  He suicided three years later, and his wife returned to Germany.

The survivors held true to their founder’s teachings and married among themselves to preserve their racial purity.  Today, Nueva Germania produces yerba mate (a local tea), sugarcane, cotton, tobacco, and still has pockets of German culture.  Most of the population speak a mixture of German and indigenous Guaraní.

Perhaps the most successful Utopia of all was achieved by Confederate expatriates, who fled the southern United States after their defeat in the Civil War.  They were enticed to Brazil by Emperor Dom Pedro II, who hoped to gain expertise in cotton farming.  Some 20,000 Southerners moved to Brazil, settling near São Paulo where they founded the city of Vila Americana.  Today, 10% of Americana’s 237,000 citizens can claim Confederate descent.

One Southerner, Jason William Stone, made a fortune in tobacco and rubber.  His descendants still have the surname Stone and are found in Manaus on the Amazon.

While only a few families still live on land owned by their Confederate forebears, their descendants learned Portuguese, intermarried with Brazilians, and are spread throughout the country.

In one of history’s bizarre time warps, the Festa Confederada is celebrated to this day; thousands of Confederados gather in Confederate uniforms, fly Confederate flags, and eat cuisine from the Deep South.

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Argentina became the Irish Utopia.  Today, it is home to the fifth largest Irish community in the world, and the largest in any non-English speaking nation.  In some estimates, the modern Irish-Argentine community numbers from 650,000 up to one million!

The first waves of Irish emigrants arrived from 1830, the largest between 1850-1870.  Escaping feminine and grinding poverty at home, Irish immigrants settled in Buenos Aires working as labourers, merchants, teachers and artisans; Irish women worked as domestic servants.  Later waves worked in agriculture and prospered from wool and lamb production, even buying their own farms.  One Irish mercenary, William Brown, fought for the cause of Argentine independence, founded the Argentine navy, and became a national hero.

Sadly, in 1889, the Dresden Affair saw the end of mass migration.  Irish-Argentine agents recruited impoverished Dubliners and packed them on board the steamer City of Dresden; conditions on board took a heavy toll.  Reaching Buenos Aires, seven hundred went on to establish an Irish utopian colony called Napostá, which failed within months.  Most of these immigrants returned to Ireland or migrated to the United States.

Despite this one failure, the Irish have contributed much to Argentina.  Names such as Casey, Cooke, Cullen, Dillon, Farrell, O’Brien and O’Gorman are sprinkled through Argentine history and culture — including Violet Jessup, stewardess and nurse, who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

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Finally, we come to Y Wladfa — the Welsh Utopia in the Argentine province of Patagonia. 

And again, it took a firebrand to stir the public’s imagination.  Michael Jones, a Welsh nationalist nonconformist preacher, called for a new “Little Wales beyond Wales”.  He wanted to set up Welsh-speaking colonies far from English domination. 

On 28 July 1865, 153 Welsh settlers arrived in Patagonia on board the tea clipper Mimosa.  Welsh tailors, cobblers, carpenters, brickmakers and miners, with no knowledge of farming, found themselves in an arid land.  To their credit, they worked with the indigenous Patagonians and soon Y Wladfa was flourishing.  Some 1,000 Welsh immigrants arrived between 1886 and 1911.  Welsh town names dot the landscape in Chubut Province — Gaiman, Trelew and Trevelin.

Today, there are 70,000 proud Welsh-Patagonians, with Welsh speakers numbering from 1,500 to 5000.

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This bizarre desire to establish new colonies has certainly proved the old proverb right: The grass is always greener on the other side.  Even if that grass is growing in the farthest corner of the world! 

We can also appreciate how charismatic leaders can persuade ordinary men and women to turn their backs on the familiar and journey to remote, inhospitable regions in the name of freedom or culture.  In virtually every case, the original Utopian colonies are still on the map, even though their lofty ideals mostly faded many, many years ago.